Burton Watson : biography

1925 -

Burton Watson (born 1925) is an accomplished translatorStirling 2006, pg. 92 of Chinese and Japanese literature and poetry. He has received awards including the Gold Medal Award of the Translation Center at Columbia University in 1979, the PEN Translation Prize in 1995 for his translation with Hiroaki Sato of From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry, and again in 1995 for Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o.

Notes

Translations

Notable translations include:

The Lotus Sutra: and Its Opening and Closing Sutras, 2009

Late Poems of Lu You, Ahadada Books, 2007.

Analects of Confucius, 2007

The Tale of the Heike, 2006

The Record of the Orally Transmitted Teachings, 2004

For All My Walking: Free-Verse Haiku of Taneda Santōka with Excerpts from His Diaries, 2004

The Selected Poems of Du Fu, 2002

The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, vol 1 in 1999 and vol 2 in 2006.

Vimalakirti Sutra 1997

The Wild Geese (Gan, by Mori Ōgai), 1995

Selected Poems of Su Tung-Po, (Copper Canyon Press, 1994)

The Lotus Sutra, 1993

Records of the Grand Historian: Han Dynasty, 1992

Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home, 1991

The Tso Chuan: Selections from China’s Oldest Narrative History, 1989

The Flower of Chinese Buddhism (Zoku Watakushi no Bukkyō-kan, by Ikeda Daisaku), 1984

Grass Hill: Poems and Prose by the Japanese Monk Gensei, 1983

Ryōkan: Zen Monk-Poet of Japan, 1977

Buddhism: The First Millennium (Watakushi no Bukkyō-kan, by Ikeda Daisaku), 1977

The Living Buddha (Watakushi no Shakuson-kan, by Ikeda Daisaku), 1976

Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T’ang Poet Han-Shan, 1970

The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, 1968

Records of the Grand Historian of China, 1961

Many of Watson's translations have been published through the Columbia University Press.

Biography

Watson was born in New Rochelle, New York. He dropped out of high school at age 17 to join the Navy in 1943 and was stationed on repair vessels in the South Pacific. His first experiences in Japan came of weekly shore leaves when he was stationed on a ship at Yokosuka Harbor in 1945. Subsequently, he majored in Chinese and Japanese studies at Columbia University. In 1951Halper 1991, pg. 53 he returned to Kyoto, this time as a Ford Foundation Overseas Fellow. In 1956 he completed a dissertation on Sima Qian, earning a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He worked as an English teacher at Doshisha University in Kyoto, as a research assistant to Yoshikawa Kōjirō, who was Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Kyoto University, and as a member of Ruth Fuller Sasaki's team translating Buddhist texts into English. He has also taught at Stanford and Columbia as a professor of Chinese. He moved to Japan in 1973, where he remains to this day, and has devoted much of his time to translation.

He and colleague Professor Donald Keene frequently attend and participate in the seminars of William Theodore de Bary given to students at Columbia University.